Advice on maven 2

["Litton, Tom - CEPM" <To...@cepm-us.com>]

I'm implementing a plugin to generate tomcat server instances and I was hoping to get some help with it.  We have 2 different tomcat servers, that are almost identical, except each deploys different web applications (one for web apps that are accessible from the internet, one for internal web apps).  Therefore we create 2 servers, one gets installed on a server in the DMZ and the other gets installed on an internal server.
 
The plugin should do the following:
 
1.  Copy the tomcat server files to a working directory.  
2.  Copy config files and modified catalina.bat file to config and to bin (overwriting files that are there currently).  
3.  Generate the server.xml file using a velocity template.  We change the tomcat settings depending on the build profile (dev, qa, prod) and type (internet, internal).
4.  Compile and jar custom extension classes and place it in the server/lib file.  These classes are directly dependent on tomcat server classes.
5.  Compile and jar (or copy from the repository) our core business and utilities library and copy it to common/lib.  Nearly every one of our web applications are dependent on this jar (and therefore its dependencies).
6.  Copy web apps (of the appropriate type) from the repository into the webapps directory.
7.  Copy all common libraries to common/lib
8.  Zip up the entire server and copy it to a repository.
 
The idea is that you can unzip the final file and get a fully functioning server.
 
The first 4 steps and the last step should be pretty straight forward.  We already implemented this in a maven.xml file using ant tasks for maven 1.  I can just move it to a plugin.  
 
However, I'm not sure how to handle the dependencies.  In maven 1, we simply used properties on the dependency to mark it as a common library and wrote a plugin to copy those libraries to common/lib and copy the war file to the webapps directory after the application is built (i.e., <postGoal name="war:war">).  We are trying to get away from that mechanism.  That was invoked on the web application project, and we think it will simplify things if we keep all logic related to building the tomcat instance in one plugin and invoked on one project.  
 
What i'm planning on doing is to include our core library as a dependency into our tomcat project and include everything that should go into common/lib as dependencies on the core library.  That way I can implement the plugin to copy all jar dependencies (direct or indirect) into common/lib and have it copy the core library to common/lib and then cascade to all of its dependencies.  For the war dependencies, I'm hoping I can look at a property set on the war application project (although i'm not entirely sure how to do this) to determine if its the appropriate type (internet or internal) and copy it to the webapps directory if it is.
 
In order to keep dependencies listed in one place, the web applications can extend the core library project (or would it be better to create a parent project that contains only a pom.xml?).  If i did this, I would have to mark all the common dependencies as provided to keep them from being copied to the web-inf/lib directory.  Would this cause a problem when copying the files to common/lib explained above?
 
Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.  
 
Tom


----------------------------------------------------------------------
The information contained in this transmission is intended only for
the personal and confidential use of the designated recipients named
herein.  If the reader of this transmission is not the intended
recipient or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended
recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this
transmission in error, and that any review, dissemination,
distribution, or copying of this transmission is strictly prohibited.
If you have received this communication in error, please notify the
sender and return and delete the original transmission immediately.
Thank you.